UK coronavirus tier postcode-searching tool yanked offline as desperate Britons hunt for latest lockdown details
- Reference: 1606406289
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/26/govuk_tier_postcode_lookup_crash/
- Source link:
Arriving this morning as part of the government's scheme to partially lift lockdown measures across England, the website almost immediately died and threw up a slew of different errors before red-faced Government Digital Service (GDS) bods pulled the plug.
Hosted on gov.uk, GDS's flagship web project, the site's crash and withdrawal will be seen as an embarrassment after most of the nation flocked to the site to see what travel bans have been imposed on them from next week.
The variety of HTTP error messages thrown up by the site suggested that its operators failed to provision enough behind-the-scenes capacity to soak up the predictable surge of inbound traffic.
[1]
At the time of publication [2]the site appears to have been replaced with a straightforward "full list of local restriction tiers by area" rather than a postcode search box.
GDS, via the Cabinet Office, has been asked to comment.
[3]
At some points the entire setup powering it failed, with El Reg being able to repeatedly view gov.uk's HTTP 502 Bad Gateway status page. As Reg readers know, 502 means the relevant server is not responding because it has run out of memory.
[4]
The service itself is as simple as could be: users input a postcode and the site returns a result saying "you are in tier X". It's a database-powered lookup service that isn't overly complicated.
Last year the House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee [5]said GDS's purpose was "increasingly unclear" , in part because of the failure of its Verify digital ID service.
One would have thought, given that gov.uk is GDS's most highly visible venture, that provisioning sufficient server capacity to support a basic postcode lookup service might have been a bigger priority. ®
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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/11/26/govuk503.jpg
[2] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/full-list-of-local-restriction-tiers-by-area
[3] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/11/26/govuk504.jpg
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/11/26/govukronaerror.jpg
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/10/gds_purpose_has_become_increasingly_unclear_says_parliamentary_committee/
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Managed to look up mine
Region is always a sore point with me. I live in Brackley so officially that's 'East Midlands' but we're so far south that most of us have more in common with the South East (Banbury and Bicester) and indeed our bit of Northamptonshire pokes down into the South East (part of the M40 is in Northamptonshire).
South Midlands is a thing and would make more sense but that's not an official UK region.
Anyway it's fairly academic in this case. It was obvious we were going to be in tier 2 and anyone who needed to check probably hasn't been paying attention to local news.
Re: Managed to look up mine
Tier is not based on local infection rates or changes in them. Likely set as easy to describe verbally.
For how much local situation does not match up to the tiers see [1]https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1331961271323942915 .
[1] https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1331961271323942915
Bothered?
Not.
Tier Zero
For those unable to look up their tier?
Re: Tier Zero
No, tier 504.
It's a crying shame...
Cloud all the way
If only there was some way of automatically expanding the capability of their web site in line with customer demand then all these problems could be avoided.
As its public facing, it doesn't even have to be on G-Cloud, so you don't even have to pay over the odds for it either.
Re: Cloud all the way
Yes, that's one of the few times Cloud makes sense. They should have realised that there would be a gynormous spike for a few hours so spin up a lot of capacity then ramp it back down tomorrow. Thankfully Guido had captured the list so that's where I discovered how stupid the tiering is.
This is easy to scale... or should be
A complete list of postcodes, with a tier number is thousands of small entries. Just put it in memory sorted, and binary search. Nothing changes, so no need for anything clever with multi-threading.
But this is gov.uk so it will be something massively complex and not easily scalable.
Re: This is easy to scale... or should be
Probably only needs the first half of the postcode so an even smaller list
Re: This is easy to scale... or should be
It probably uses an Excel spreadsheet for the database, and the web server is a VB macro :)
Apparently I'm either in tier 503 or 404.
Managed to look up mine
But lots of errors and long waits.
I wondered at the time why they didn't just have a static list / map. Postcode is nice and helps people who aren't sure which region they're in (on the boundary; boundary changes), but not essential if it's going to be that difficult to make it work (which it isn't).